The Pursuit of Prints

Print collectors Les and Jo Garfield in their Upper East Side apartment.

ART & ANTIQUES
September 2010

The Pursuit of Prints
by James Panero

Jo and Leslie Garfield have built their home around a seminal collection of modernist works.

Here in their high-rise Upper East Side apartment with sweeping views of Central Park, Leslie and Johanna Garfield, the husband-and-wife collecting team, could always use that extra square foot for their latest acquisition. Six years ago, in order to accommodate their growing collection, the apartment underwent a four-year renovation before the couple moved in. Today the home doubles as a private gallery, with specially constructed hallways and sliding walls, conservation space, and an office for an in-house cataloger and registrar. Still, there never seems to be quite enough room. “Hanging and getting things in place is not an easy thing to do,” says Jo. Fortunately, that lack of wall space has never prevented them from going after the next print. The passion of these two residents for their collection—and for the art of collecting—shows little interest in such trivial considerations.

“When I bought my first print in 1954, by Erich Heckel—a woodcut illustration for Dostoevsky in 1915—things burst all over me,” says Les. “The primal scream became a part of my life.” He encountered his first print in a Munich gallery while in the army. “That led to me to a 10 or 12-year period of collecting black and white German expressionist prints.” Les now hangs that first print among his many others from the period on a wall by the front door.

But Les has Jo to thank for leading him in a different direction, one that has today resulted in an acclaimed focus of the collection. In the early 1980s, Jo saw an example of the color-rich work of the then under-appreciated Provincetown Printers, an early American avant-garde circle on Cape Cod centered around Blanche Lazzell, a pioneer of the “white-line” woodblock print. She knew they had to go for it. “They just made me feel good, and the German Expressionist ones didn’t,” Jo recalls. “You fall in love with something and like the work, and you pursue it,” explains Les. “And that’s exactly what happened with Provincetown. It was Jo who saw the first print, and this mad chase was on to locate dealers and people who had this work.”

The chase led the couple from galleries to knocking on the doors of Lazzell’s relatives in West Virginia. “Over the years, I was able to get the block and the print from a relative, then the drawing for the print, then a watercolor for the print, and I love it,” says Les. “I guess that’s why I never sold anything.” Les says he refused to bargain-hunt, paying top dollar even when the sellers were unaware of market value. “I had a good relationship with various relatives and, quite frankly, was able to acquire really limited editions. These were works that were never seen. I took the position that when you see some of them, just go for them, because if you don’t go for them, they cannot be collected en masse. I just pursued them whenever I could.” In 2002, the heart of the Garfield’s collection formed the exhibition “From Paris to Provincetown: Blanche Lazzell and the Color Woodcut” at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, which traveled to Cleveland and the University of Wisconsin, where the couple met as undergraduates.

“A visit to the home of Leslie and Johanna Garfield confirms both their passion for the prints of Blanche Lazzell in particular, and their interest in complementing her work with fine examples of her Provincetown contemporaries,” noted MFA director Malcolm Rogers at the time of the show. “Multiple impressions with different colorations, as well as numerous drawings and carved woodblocks, constitute a collection of glowing examples from one of the most extraordinary print productions in the years between the two world wars.” Much of the Garfields’ print collection, which they say will never be sold, is promised to the MFA along with other institutions. Some prints have already left the apartment. “We have given some to some museums,” says Jo. “It’s like sending a child away to boarding school.”

For Les, the energy for the chase separates him from the ordinary art buyer. It also speaks to the energy he has exhibited in his professional life. From canvasing door-to-door in the Bronx for potential home sellers, Les built his own boutique real estate firm, Leslie J. Garfield & Co., which specializes in brokering high-end New York buildings and townhouses. Jo is an acclaimed journalist and memoirist who both directs the collection and casts a writer’s eye on her husband’s collecting drive. “I often think if he had to give up me or the collection, I’m not sure which he would choose,” she says, noting that Les’s father, an avid collector of shells and toy cars, started Les on a stamp collection. “Collecting runs in the blood. He’s like that about things. If he’s interested, he is intensely involved.”

“Once we’ve localized who we’re interested in, it’s just about going after them and showing them to Jo,” Les says of his method. “Over this period of years, we’re in sync with each other.” Together their collecting tastes have taken them through the prints of Jasper Johns and David Hockney, the British pop artist Richard Hamilton, and other contemporary British artists. Through the Provincetown artists, they discovered a circle of British printmakers working between the wars known as the Grosvenor School, with dynamic colorful works and today the jewel in the crown of the collection. These works by the artists Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth and others took the conventions of Futurism and Cubism and applied them to depicting the energy of British life between the wars. “We both latched onto the Grovensor School with mutual enthusiasm,” says Les. In 2008, the Garfields’ Grosvenor prints formed the heart of the eye-popping exhibition “Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914–1939,” which was on view at the MFA Boston and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“No other collector in the United States has continued to pursue this area with as much energy and single-mindedness,” noted curator Stephen Coppel of the British Museum. “Long before the current high visibility of contemporary British art, the Garfields were collecting British avant-garde prints, at a time when American museums were generally reluctant to acquire them.”

“The Garfields were exceptional in that they could follow their own hearts ahead of the museums. Now the museums have caught up,” says the New York dealer Mary Ryan, who first met them three decades ago as they were collecting the Provincetown prints and continued working with them on the Grosvenor school. “There are always many people interested to collect what is hot at the moment, but it is thrilling when you have a collector who wants to build a collection over a lifetime. They both enjoy the solo process of collecting and the pleasure of living with art. It’s a constant pursuit. Their interest hasn’t waned over the years; it’s expanded and deepened.”

And the reason for that continued interest? Simple, says Jo. “Collecting is a form of madness. It’s not a bad obsession. It’s not a drug addiction. It’s a good obsession. It keeps you out of trouble.”

New York’s Pioneer Zones

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CITY JOURNAL

Summer 2010

New York’s Pioneer Zones
by James Panero

Residents of formerly blighted neighborhoods deserve the city’s support.

Imagine government officials sweeping through your building one night, rounding up you and your neighbors and tossing you out on the street. It might sound like something out of the Stasi handbook, but it played out a few years ago on the forlorn boundary of two of New York’s outer boroughs. On an October evening in 2007, the Department of Buildings, along with the New York City Fire Department, forcibly removed over 200 tenants living in a low-slung warehouse building at 17-17 Troutman, on the border of Ridgewood, Queens, and Bushwick, Brooklyn. The FDNY had reasons to shut down the facility: it had issued numerous fire and safety violations against the Troutman landlord, who had failed to address them. But the root of the crisis was the city’s antiquated, growth-hindering zoning laws, which continue to put hundreds of young, creative citizens at the mercy of poor living conditions and eviction.

Gotham’s zoning codes, which distinguish between residential and industrial areas, weren’t originally intended to function as they do today. When the first zoning resolution went into effect in 1916, city elders understood the need to protect residential neighborhoods from the encroachment of heavy industry. The city’s disastrous 1961 rezoning turned this protection on its head. In a failed effort to protect a dwindling industrial base, the 1961 resolution artificially enlarged the manufacturing zone to depress the cost of industrial rents. Swaths of the city became off-limits to residential redevelopment. Industry fled anyway, driven out by the high cost of labor and the city’s suffocating tax burden.

Though modified since, the 1961 policy remains in force, and it has created shadow economies and shadow lives. Landlords covertly lease the warehouse and factory space to residents, absorbing whatever modest financial penalties the city imposes. Superintendents maintain off-the-books waiting lists of prospective tenants. What results is a state of impermanence for residents. People who might otherwise wish to improve their buildings and invest in their neighborhoods are left with uncertain futures, forever fearful of a midnight knock on the door from the Department of Buildings.

The residents of 17-17 Troutman are a good example. They accepted slumlike surroundings in exchange for inexpensive housing (several were working artists in need of large space). They brought vitality to a neighborhood that had seen generations of flight and decay and was struggling to rise from the ashes of rioting in 1977. These urban pioneers were part of a wave of gentrification that helped transform a forgotten neighborhood, devastated by crime, arson, and misguided urban policy, into a fashionable, bohemian district (see “The Death and Life of Bushwick,” Spring 2008). But by paying rent on what was technically a commercial lease and living in their apartments, the Troutman tenants were violating an irregularly enforced law. And their landlord had never converted the building safely into apartments, because [why? need a clause explaining connection between legal limbo and failure to bring building up to code]. Hence the residents’ eviction in 2007.

The city knows that such warehouse buildings have occupants. One need only look up in neighborhoods like Morgantown, an industrial-zoned district in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to see the curtains. But rather than thoroughly enforcing current building codes or changing them altogether, the city has practiced a policy of don’t ask, don’t tell. “It is basically a Wild West,” says Laura Braslow, a student of urban planning who runs the volunteer organization Arts in Bushwick. “You have a lot of people in buildings and they have no real tenant rights, so you may have unsafe conditions. You have people putting resources, time, and energy into a neighborhood that they will never reap the benefits from. Everyone on the ground is expecting to get kicked out at some time.” Braslow’s colleague, performance artist Chloe Bass, describes her building’s substandard conditions: “I have been living in Bushwick for the last three and a half years in an apartment zoned for commercial space. Our apartment has no fire exit. Our building is probably not up to code. We have one door in and out, and no other way to get out unless you jump out of the window.”

“They are pioneers,” says Deborah Brown, a mid-career artist who has opened a gallery in Bushwick called Storefront, of residents like Braslow and Bass. “They are living in places no one would want to live--industrial areas with few services and fewer amenities. They create neighborhoods and make it safe for the rest of us to follow.” A painter who has exhibited a critically praised series of local landscapes developed in her Bushwick studio, Brown is representative of the artistic community’s attempts to put down local roots. She now serves on a community board and, with her husband, has opened an orthodontic clinic in the neighborhood.

The solution to the zoning problem, of course, is to rezone industrial areas to permit new residential use. City Councilwoman Diana Reyna, like many of her constituents in Bushwick’s Hispanic population, opposes rezoning, mistakenly believing that manufacturing (and the jobs it brings) could return to the community’s blighted industrial zones. But this summer, a battle for political control between Reyna and powerful state assemblyman Vito Lopez has led to an encouraging development in the zoning crisis--at least in Bushwick.

Lopez rules Bushwick with an armada of subsidized social programs through which he extracts political fealty; in general, he has little interest in zoning reform that doesn’t expand his control of existing and new subsidized housing. But he also recognizes a new constituency when he sees one, and Bushwick’s struggling artists are just such a constituency. So in Albany, the assemblyman proposed an extension of New York State’s 1982 Loft Law, which was a temporary solution to the same problem the city confronts today--though back then, it involved artists living illegally in converted loft space in downtown Manhattan. The Loft Law didn’t rezone these districts, but it did grant legal status to industrial buildings with a recent history of tenant occupancy, thus ensuring that the buildings got brought up to code. Lopez proposed to apply the law to three more parts of the city, including the artist areas in Bushwick and East Williamsburg. In a midnight deal on June 22, Governor David Paterson signed Lopez’s new Loft Law over the objections of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who argued that it “would prevent the City from taking measures to preserve even small islands of industrial businesses.” The law is a step in the right direction, though a small one, since it fails to rezone a single industrial district for residential use.

The artists of Bushwick were surely breaking the law by living in buildings zoned for industry. But the real injustice has been the city’s unwillingness to embrace market demand for housing by rezoning warehouse districts for residential use. Meeting that demand could continue to revitalize some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods--and in the process, welcome New York’s next generation of creative talent.

The Best Way to Really Give Away Money

Philanthropist Lewis B. Cullman says "release the pot of gold."

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
August 20, 2010

The Best Way to Really Give Away Money
by James Panero

Private foundations tend to sit on their pots of gold. They should be spending them down more.

When 40 of America's richest individuals signed the "giving pledge," a challenge set by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates to donate half of one's wealth to charity, at least one philanthropist was not impressed. "My opinion is: So what?" says Lewis B. Cullman.

With a record of giving that extends in the hundreds of millions and throughout New York's cultural institutions, Mr. Cullman, who is 91, is alarmed by how the money donated to charity by the very wealthy usually ends up. Locked, he tells me, in private grant-making foundations that may only release a trickle of the billions of dollars squirreled away inside.

Mr. Cullman's argument gets to the heart of the different ways Americans donate to charity. Most of us write donation checks directly to needy causes. Those with greater means set up private grant-making foundations, which hold nearly tax-free assets in endowments—and often give away as little as the government allows.

Under current tax law, private foundations are only required to spend 5% of their endowment per year. Twenty percent of that may go to operating expenses. Since endowment investments historically earn more than what they must give out, foundations may never need to dip into their principal assets, yet are able to feed their own administrative bloat in perpetuity.

Mr. Cullman believes their recent track record proves that private foundations exist primarily for their own self-perpetuation. In the last year, during the economic downturn, many foundations cut their rate of giving because of losses in their endowments. Based on a survey of more than 1,000 foundations, the Foundation Center estimates an 8.4% drop in giving for 2009, in inflation-adjusted terms, the steepest yearly decline since the center began its tracking in 1975.

For Mr. Cullman, this decline in giving in a time of acute need means that foundation administrators are more concerned about the size of their nest-eggs than about their philanthropic mission. He says that foundations should have "released the pot of gold" and increased their donations, even if that means cutting considerably into their endowments.

To force them to action, Mr. Cullman believes, the mandated annual payout rate should be increased from 5%; or foundations should be required to enact "sunset clauses," for spending down their assets in an established time frame. His position, spelled out in his book, "Can't Take It With You," has not made him popular in the world of foundation management. When he mentioned the premise to Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation, he "almost dropped his glass," Mr. Cullman recalls. "'My God,' he laughed. 'You'll put me out of business.'"

In certain cases, going out of business might make sense. "Many foundations start out with the best of intentions," says Rick Cohen, national correspondent for Nonprofit Quarterly magazine, but "over time they tend to stagnate." Even foundations with built-in sunsets (the Gates Foundation has a 50-year spend-down) are not necessarily protected from administrative top-heaviness.

In the 1920s, Julius Rosenwald, the chairman of Sears, Roebuck & Co., first raised the alarm about foundation bureaucracy. While nothing in the law prevents private foundations from spending themselves out of existence, few big ones do. The Aaron Diamond Foundation was one example in the 1980s, giving away $50 million to AIDS research. The influential conservative John M. Olin Foundation recently completed its own spend down, put in place to prevent ideological drift.

Despite these exceptions, little ever changes in the broad landscape of foundation policy, and the cure may be as bad as the disease. "These are private organizations that ought to have control of the money," warns Leslie Lenkowsky, professor at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. Sunset clauses, if government mandated, may have "unintended consequences," he says, and can not guarantee the money is used most effectively.

Even with diminishing resources of their own, many foundations are already working tirelessly to help their beneficiaries confront the economic downturn. Most experts agree that bad economic times call for increased giving by philanthropic organizations. "We ought to make the payout rule more flexible," says Mr. Lenkowsky. "In down times it should go up. In good times it should go down. It should be a counter-cyclical rule." Adds Rick Cohen: "They have endowments that are rainy-day funds. This is the time to tap them."

According to Fortune magazine, if every member of the Forbes 400 list followed the Gates "giving pledge," the total would be $600 billion--equal to the assets currently in private grant-making foundations. Should these perpetual monuments to yesterday's donors make their own giving pledge and spend down their endowments?

Just ask Lewis Cullman: "When you set up a family foundation and turn it over to bureaucrats, it is not human nature to vote yourself out of existence. It's time to end that, for the good of us all."